Sexploitation film

A sexploitation film is an independently produced, low budget feature film generally associated with the 1960s and serving largely as a vehicle for the exhibition of non-explicit sexual situations and gratuitous nudity. The genre is a subgenre of exploitation films.

Sexploitation films come in two main categories:

Nudie-cuties

Films set in nudist camps and fantasy-based voyeuristic sex comedies were popular in the 1959-1969 period and were a development from the nudist camp documentaries of the '30s-'50s. The Supreme Court had previously ruled that films set in nudist camps were exempt from the general ban on film nudity, as they were deemed to be educational. By 1967 passive voyeurism had become passe and nudies became structured around non-explicit sex scenes.

Roughies

Films featuring violence against women, including kidnapping, rape, murder, torture, whipping and forced sex slavery or prostitution. These were mostly gritty, black-and-white crime dramas created as an alternative to the colorful, light-hearted nudie comedies.

History: tease, sleaze and venereal disease

The roots of sexploitation go back to the innocent nudist films and melodramatic exploitation potboilers that emerged in the 1930s. The earliest European and Californian nudist colony features date back to titles such as This Nude World (1932), Elysia (1933), The Unashamed (1938) and They Wear No Clothes (1941). These were presented in an almost clinical fashion as documentaries of sociological value. Edited footage from these films became fodder for countless re-releases up to the early '60s.

There were also many "educational" ethnographic documentaries and docu-dramas such as Virgins of Bali (1932), Isle of Paradise (1932), and Legong a.k.a. Dance of the Virgins (1935) that showcased scenes of topless native girls in exotic locations around the world.

Exploitation films are a somewhat different breed. These are low-budget, independent melodramas that embraced sordid and shocking topics that were unacceptable for mainstream films. To get around censorship laws, these lurid exposes usually adopted a quasi-documentary format with a moralizing on-screen host or narrator burdened with the unhappy duty of alerting the public to the sleaze and immorality threatening decent society. However, many of these films, especially Reefer Madness (1936), with their strident, preachy tone and overwrought hysterics, are seen today as camp classics enjoyed for their ironic, unintentional humor.

These were crude, cynical films churned out on a shoe-string budget for a quick profit and shopped around from town to town in "roadshow" fashion (they were rarely seen in mainstream theaters). Behind the convenient facade of the moralistic public service film, thrill-seeking audiences could gape at the forbidden fruit of on-screen nudity, wild drug parties, the degradation of prostitution, promiscuous sex, teen pregnancy, abortion, the horrors of venereal disease, and other controversial topics.

Thus, brief nude scenes of women appeared in Maniac (1934) and Sex Madness (1937), with skinny-dipping sequences in Damaged Lives (1933), Marihuana (1936) and Child Bride (1938), a tawdry film about old geezer hillbillies marrying underage girls.

Whipping and spanking scenes were also exploited and eroticized for the first time for the purpose of selling theater tickets. The best example is [[Slaves in Bondage]] (1937), a mild expose on big city prostitution. Two lingerie-clad hookers in a specialized "Oriental Room" are seen playfully wrestling and spanking each other with sadomasochistic glee.

Lash of the Penitentes (1937) pretends to blow the lid off the secretive religious rites of fanatical flagellation cults in Mexico. But what it really offers is a hackneyed drama and some dark, murky footage of a topless Mexican girl being whipped to atone for her sins.

Films of the fifties

These Girls Are Fools (1956), from an uncredited director, is a remarkable 20-minute short subject film about an innocent girl lured to Hollywood with dreams of movie stardom. Her first picture is an "art film" that requires nudity and skinnydipping. Unable to get any more film offers, she is forced to pose as a nude model for trashy girlie magazines. Near the end a photoshoot has her wrists bound, lash marks on her back, and a man menacing her with a whip. The basic story of corrupted innocence would be used in countless roughies in the following decade. (Note: this short can be viewed on the Internet Archive and is also available on the double feature DVD release of College Girl Confidential / Motel Confidential from Legend House. )

Exploitation producer George Weiss kept the sleaze ball rolling with racy striptease films (Hollywood After Midnight, 1954), "cat-fight" female wrestling features (Racket Girls aka Pin Down Girls, 1951), and seedy melodramas on drug addiction (Dance Hall Racket and Girl Gang, both 1954).

Weiss also produced Ed Wood's first movie, the notoriously nutty transvestite treatise Glen or Glenda (1953). During an extended dream sequence, Weiss added bizarre scenes (taken from another project) of scantily-clad women being bound, gagged, and whipped. This appears to be inspired by the underground film-loops of Irving Klaw. At this time Klaw was quietly working in New York with Bettie Page and other models producing the world's first fetish films devoted to erotic bondage, spanking, and pony play.

Weiss also cobbled together old nudist colony footage for features like Nudist Life (1961). A few years later he would play a major role in the creation of the innovative roughie genre.

European films were a few years ahead in creating full-fledged movies that exploited nudity. A young Sophia Loren was a topless harem girl in Era Lui, Si, Si! (1951); the German Liane, Jungle Goddess (1956) offers a half-naked female Tarzan; and in England, George Harrison Marks released Naked as Nature Intended (1961). Marks later worked for the spanking/caning magazine Janus and created Kane. He made a number of spanking videos and softcore pornographic films in the '80s and '90s.

In the U.S., nudist camp documentaries faded away after the more cinematic nudie-cutie comedies emerged, starting with Russ Meyer's groundbreaking The Immoral Mr. Teas in 1959.

Nudie-Cuties in the sixties

The influence of Russ Meyer's nudie fantasy-comedy, along with changes in censorship laws, allowed filmmakers to make full-length features, mostly in color, that gleefully indulged in every type of male voyeuristic fantasy.

It was as if the pages of Playboy magazine had come to life on screen. These were sex comedies without sex, just nudity. Many were lighthearted spoofs of other film genres. Cowboys are attacked by a tribe of topless Indian maidens in Revenge of the Virgins (1960); astronauts encounter sexy aliens in Nude on the Moon (1963); and Ed Wood's campy horror-nudie, Orgy of the Dead (1965) features topless dancers from beyond the grave (and included two whipping scenes to boot).

The only Hollywood star who dared to appear in a "nudie" was busty Jayne Mansfield in the low-budget Promises, Promises (1963). Her nude scenes created a sensation, but the film was dreadful and did nothing for her faltering career.

By the late sixties, nudies became more ambitious and started to include simulated sex and kinky spanking scenes as in Thar She Blows! (1968) and Love Me or Leave (1969) and floggings in the campy Wanda, the Sadistic Hypnotist (1969). There were also lavish historical comedy-dramas with erotic spanking and whipping scenes such as The Head Mistress, The Lustful Turk, The Ribald Tales of Robin Hood (all from 1968) and The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet (1969).

The origin of the roughie

The roughie genre was a deliberate move in the opposite direction from the silly, technicolor nudies. These were dark, gritty, urban melodramas shot in black-and-white that show the influence of the film-noir crime dramas of the Forties and Fifties. Nude scenes became part of a sexually violent environment that was harsh and mysogynistic. These films were set in the sordid underworld of pornography, prostitution, and white slavery rings. There were also stories depicting sadistic psycho-killers that anticipated the slasher film genre that emerged in the Seventies.

The precursors to this genre include The Prime Time (1960) by Hershell Gordon Lewis, one of the last juvenile delinquent/Beat Generation exploitation films—and one of the first B-movies with nudity. Some prints include an extended skinny-dipping segment. It also boasts an energetic cat fight between two women and nude models posing for a beatnik artist.

The Sinister Urge (1961), Ed Wood's last mainstream directorial effort, uses footage from an unfinished project by George Weiss. This tepid "smut racket" expose blames pornography for a deranged man's psychotic killing spree. No nudity, but there is some bondage imagery and a good deal of suggested sleaziness.

The Sadist (1963) was a shocking and disturbing B-picture for its time. The story, about a psychotic punk who ensnares and terrorizes three innocent people, has influenced many filmmakers.

Around the same time, H.G. Lewis and David Friedman pioneered roughie horror with Blood Feast (1963), the first "gore" or "splatter" film. Also highly influential with scenes of bloody violence and cannibalism (and even a whipping scene) that had not been seen before.

But it is the relatively tame The Scum of the Earth (1963), also by Lewis and Friedman, that is generally considered the prototype roughie. An innocent college girl working for a "glamour" photographer is blackmailed into posing for racy nude pictures. These are sold on the street the way dope peddlers sell drugs. Barely a glimpse of nudity and a belt-lashing done off-camera, but it established the tone and basic formula.

The New York underground

The first full-fledged roughies came out of New York in 1964. A trilogy of crudely made low-budget films about a white slavery ring were a surprise hit on the grindhouse circuit. These were White Slaves of Chinatown, followed by Olga's Girls, and Olga's House of Shame (all from 1964). The latter features a brutal spanking with a nail-studded board. All three center around captive women being bound, abused, humiliated, tortured, whipped, drugged, and forced into prostitution by Olga, a cruel dominatrix who works for a major crime syndicate. Significantly, these films were produced by George Weiss and show the influence of Irving Klaw's bondage films, albeit taken to an extreme.

Weiss encouraged New York filmmaker Michael Findlay to make even more violent roughies. Findlay made a number of highly regarded genre films, including the "Flesh" psycho-killer trilogy. The Curse of Her Flesh (1968) has a remarkable F/F frontal whipping scene.

Titillating, and deliberately fetishistic, scenes of corporal punishment became common. RENT-A-GIRL (1965) has paddling and whipping (see the video clip at the Internet Archive). The director of this film also made Pamela, Pamela you are... (1968) which starts out like a nudie but soon delves into spanking and S&M scenes. Venus in Furs (1967) is based on the classic novel on masochism by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. An abducted girl is belt-whipped in the Olga-inspired Cargo of Love (1968). And In Hot Blood (1968) portrays decadent nude models who enjoy whipping, spanking, and caning each other.

The Bizarre Ones (1968) by Ron Sullivan (aka Henri Pachard) follows a group of hippie-style freaks who enjoy an S&M lifestyle at a remote country house. Pachard would go on to direct porn and many BDSM and spanking videos, including several volumes of the Dresden Diary series from Bizarre Video.

Hollywood roughies

The California roughies were also made quickly on a very low budget, but generally have a more polished style with superior filming techniques, editing, and acting.

The Defilers (1965), from producer David F. Friedman and director Lee Frost, is considered a classic roughie. A pair of sadists kidnap a beautiful girl and make her their love slave. This has spanking and belt-lashing scenes. (Video clip at the Internet Archive.)

Tortured Females (1965), perhaps the first California film to copy the Olga formula, depicts white slavers whipping and humiliating captive women. This also has scenes that reflect an Irving Klaw influence.

Love is a Four Letter Word (aka The Love Girls, 1966), also from Friedman and Frost, was billed as the first art film in the exploition genre and contains a harsh sorority initiation paddling scene. (This scene is available for viewing at Internet Archive.)

Motel Confidential (1967) is an unusual black-and-white nudie sex comedy with one roughie belt-spanking scene that shows the transition between the two genres. (This spanking scene can now be viewed at the Internet Archive.)

Frost and Friedman also released fake "shockumentaries" showing human depravity around the world, including S&M clubs, whipping, etc. These are: It’s a Sick, Sick, Sick World!, Mondo Bizarro, and Mondo Freudo (all 1966).

Friedman, with and without Frost, produced a number of color roughies as well. Love Camp 7 (1968), which has a severe belt spanking, was the forerunner of Women in Prison films and Nazi exploitation. Eroticized whippings occur in the colorful The Lustful Turk and the Westerns Brand of Shame and Hot Spur (all from 1968).

This film cycle more or less ended with the decade. Friedman's roughie-Western The Ramrodder (1969) has better production values than the previous films in the genre. It also has a remarkably long and erotic whipping scene of an Indian maiden.

The seventies: porn and roughie-horror

By the early seventies, full-length X-rated feature films were being produced and shown in theaters for the first time. The rapidly growing demand for explicit pornography made the grindhouse films of the '60s suddenly obsolete. Sexploitation films underwent a quick transformation. The nudie-cutie became the template for a new brand of softcore X-rated sex comedies. Many of these films such as Office Girls (1972), Sassy Sue (1972), The All-American Girl (1973), and Debbie Does Dallas (1978), threw in a spanking scene or two for good measure. And the French sex farce, La Fessée (1976) is about a man who is obsessed with spanking his many lovers.

The misogynistic roughie concept carried on in violent Women in Prison and Nazisploitation films (featuring brutal floggings, torture, sexual assaults, and other S&M elements) as well as hardcore porn and a spate of bizarre roughie-horror shockers.

The early pornographic features borrowed heavily from the roughie and occult horror genres. For example, the sex film The Velvet Edge (1976) plundered footage, including a violent belt-spanking scene, from the 1970 roughie The Bang Bang Gang and presented it as a flashback sequence. Hardcore sex scenes were added to the 1968 roughie Invitation to Ruin and re-released in 1973 as Invitation.

The Big Snatch (1971) is a classic example of how the '60s roughie genre made the easy transition to softcore porn in the '70s. Roughie director (and star of The Defilers) Byron Mabe tells the story about a group of young girls, including Uschi Digard, who are abducted by a crazed misogynist and held as sex slaves at a remote desert ranch house. The man beats one of the girls with a crop-like stick and forces the girls to punish each other. In the end, the girls overpower him and he receives the same corporal punishment.

X-rated titles with whipping, spanking, rough sex and elements of horror include: The Defiance of Good (1974), French sex-horror director Jean Rollin's The Seduction of Amy (1975), The Devil Inside Her (1976), House of de Sade (1977), and a number of Nazi-porn features (Hot Nazis, Hitler's Harlot, Stalag 69, et al.).

At the same time, mainstream horror films were becoming more erotic, adding nudity and controversial scenes of sexual violence that tested the limits of an R-rating. For a few years, it seemed the horror and porn industries were merging together, creating films that blended both genres into a single entity.

The originators of this new trend didn't have to go far for inspiration. Quite often the gritty black-and-white sexploitation films of the '60s were simply remade in lurid color with more explicit content. Retaining most of the old plot elements (creepy psychos, abducted women, sex slavery, abuse), the "new roughies" were marketed as titillating drive-in horror shockers. Thus, the obscure grindhouse roughie became part of the mainstream with films like Slaves in Cages, The Sinister Dwarf, Barn of the Naked Dead, House of Whipcord, The Girl in Room 2a, and Bloodsucking Freaks (all with whipping/caning scenes).

The influence of the roughies may also be responsible for the increase of sadism and the sex-based torture of women in a number of films. These include: School Girls in Chains (1973), Jean Rollin's Schoolgirl Hitchhikers (1973), Rollin's aforementioned The Seduction of Amy (1975), and sleazy rape-and-revenge films like The Last House on the Left (1972) and I Spit on Your Grave (1978).

Over in Europe, the traditional vampire movie was exploited by filmmakers who reinvented the genre by adding generous amounts of onscreen nudity, sex (with an emphasis on lesbianism), gore, and kinky sadism into the mix. In this setting it was easy to insert a gratuitous dungeon scene with nude or semi-clad women being chained up and brutally flogged. This is seen in two more films by Jean Rollin – Rape of the Vampire (1968) and Requiem for a Vampire, aka Caged Virgins (1971) – as well as Count Dracula's Great Love (1973). Spanish schlockmeister Jess Franco contributed Vampyros Lesbos (1971) among his many lurid and violent erotic films. His surreal The Erotic Rites of Frankenstein (1972) features a nude couple bound together and savagely whipped until they tumble into a pit of spikes.

The marketing of sadomasochism

With so much sex and sadism hitting the screen under the guise of horror shockers, it was no surprise that the once forbidden world of S&M and the writings of the Marquis de Sade became a sexploitation staple. There was De Sade (1969) from American International Pictures, Eugenie de Sade (1970) by Jess Franco, Justine De Sade (1972) by Claude Pierson, and Poor Cecily (1973), loosely based on de Sade's Justine and directed by Lee Frost. This was followed by Story of O and The Punishment of Anne (aka The Image) in 1975.

The seventies also saw lurid tales of sadism and taboo sex associated with slavery in the American South exploited in two notoriously trashy films. There was Mandingo (1975), with its fetishistic belt-spanking scene, and its sequel, Drum (1976). The surprise success of these films led to an Italian knockoff, Mandinga (1976). This features the eroticized whipping and sexual abuse of a female slave and a masochistic Southern belle who is aroused by having her breasts flogged.

The exploitive use of eroticized S&M, sexual violence and torture has continued in a sporadic fashion, primarily in horror films that carry a NC-17 rating. The most recent example is the controversial series of Hostel films about innocent tourists abducted and tortured to death for the amusement of a private club for sadists.

See also

• The History of spanking in film
• Spanking in mainstream films
• Nazi exploitation
• Women in prison film

More information is available at [ Wikipedia:Sexploitation_film ]

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